The winter of 2022 I spent a lot of time on Tiktok- I had just moved back to Chicago in the dead of winter and the city was on semi-lockdown due to the Omicron variant surging. This was back when people were still taking Covid semi-seriously.
Tiktok had a filter called “bearded cutie” which gave me bushy brows, stubble and a septum ring. It made me look exactly like the type of horrible guy I’d encountered over and over in my many years in the trenches dating as a polyamorous person. And thus was born the “Poly dudes to avoid” and “Polyamory red flags” video series. I made thirteen of these and it was the closest I ever went to Tiktok viral, with the Monopoly Man video getting 122.5K views. An ex even reached out to me to claim the videos were based on him- they weren’t- he just happened to exemplify a lot of the terrible qualities exhibited in these videos.
I actually identify as “ambiamorous” because I have not been strictly locked into either a monogamous or polyamorous dating style over the course of my life. There was a number of years where I did not want to be poly at all based on the toxic behaviors exemplified in these videos. I first got into poly in 1998, when I became the victim of much older unicorn hunters while still a teen, and it left a bad taste in my mouth for a long time.
The past few years have been very healing for me as I’ve formed close bonds with many good and decent poly folks and found the wonderful and relatively well adjusted Queer Polyamory Chicago group. It also helps that I date very intentionally these days, whereas I was much less discerning in my youth (though it did give me a lot of material for these videos!) But something that has really been healing for me is that the poly community has reached a level of self awareness and humility that it CAN make fun of itself. 20 years ago, these videos would have been viewed as a hate crime. For many years I was silenced when I tried to speak out about the abuses I had experienced because it was more important that polyamory maintain a squeaky clean image as a stigmatized subculture than openly address the problems that were happening behind closed doors. There seems to be much more open discourse about these issues as poly goes increasingly mainstream.
Of course there are monogamous people who watch these videos and say “see, this is why polyamory is bad and why I won’t try it.” But that’s not actually the message. I’m poly and pro-poly for the people it works well for. But I do think we need to be able to laugh at ourselves and take a cold hard look at the missteps people make in this community. Expecting to be able to do polyamory in a perfectly ethical and kind way after being socialized for monogamy takes a lot of work and intentionality. And some bad actors due use poly as a means of avoiding commitment and emotional intimacy, or much worse. Polyamory is not a free for all, and this bad behavior needs to be addressed directly instead of swept under the rug. Anyway, enjoy, and take a shower afterwards if you need to. ;)
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